Arts education may well be one of the most important ingredients of an effective education. The story of the School Arts Support Initiative (SASI) serves as an exemplar of dynamic urban middle grades communities that seek to build and sustain a rich, holistic education for students in an era defined by high-stakes accountability. As this story…

For decades, when budgets dictated teacher cutbacks, no judgment of instructional skills was required. No evaluation of student results changed the outcome. No one consulted a summative evaluation. Schools just went to the personnel file, determined hiring dates, and the last one in lost her or his chair. In the new political landscape, lawmakers…

School administrators are facing the perfect storm: a growing number of baby boomers retiring each year, an absence of experienced teachers to take their place, and high turnover among young teachers. The need to hire and retain a new generation of teachers is one of the biggest challenges facing school administrators. To fill these vacancies,…

This article discusses why the work of central-office administrators and building administrators seem so disconnected from one another. The fact that central-office administrators and principals seem to travel in orbits with different paths, with seemingly few areas of significant overlap, has a decidedly negative impact on the ability of the…

In this article, the author, who is a school principal, discusses her strategies of implementing schoolwide discipline process. Seeking a solution, she attended a two-day workshop on schoolwide discipline. In the two-day workshop, she and her staff learned to institute a more effective approach throughout the entire school, an approach that is…